1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for improving internet search results, and more particularly, methods and systems for processing entered search queries to construct a query that optimizes the relevance of the obtained results.
2. Description of the Related Art
The computing industry has seen many advances in recent years, and such advances have produced a multitude of products and services. Internet websites are examples of products and services, which are created to give users access to particular types of services, data, or searching capabilities. Online content providers are increasingly moving towards building World Wide Web sites which are more reliant on dynamic, frequently-updated content. Content continues to be made available more and more via online auction sites, stock market information sites, news and weather sites, or any other such site whose information changes on a frequent basis, oftentimes daily.
Typically, major search engines, which enable Internet users to search for information on the World Wide Web, create search databases of information which rely on pages being static instead of dynamic. To create these databases, the search engine does what is known as “crawling” web sites by retrieving the content of a given Web page and storing it for later use. These databases are extensive, and can be updated frequently by crawls to capture changes.
Once such database, is a local business database that is maintained by Yahoo!, Inc. The local business database holds information obtained from websites and other resources, to define various data that may be useful to interested users. To initiate a search of the local business database, users are provided with special search text boxes, where terms must be specifically entered into selected boxes. Depending on what the users enter, the search engine provides the best possible results and some ranking. However, users don't always know to use the special search text boxes, and end up using the general search box of a search engine. As a result, the search engine needs to do more analysis of the search terms, to quickly provide the search results. If a user intended to search for a particular business in some local area, the general search engine may not look to other databases.
Thus, although other databases holding local business information are maintained for other specialized search queries, these databases are not accessed when a search is done through the general search text box. Consequently, searches for local information, e.g., businesses, which are commonly entered in a non-structured manner, do not generally return quality results. Additionally, even if the search terms are entered in a structured manner, into the general search text box, the results still lack quality, as no processing is done on the query terms before the search is executed. Thus, the quality of web search results for local queries is not satisfying.
It is in this context that embodiments of the invention arise.